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No skating in field hockey but it's no girly sport

It is only a scurrilous rumour that Michael Mahood has named his goal posts Jim and Ethel. Of course, he is also the one who started it.

By ROSIE DIMANNO

Sat., Aug. 9, 2008

BEIJING

It is only a scurrilous rumour that Michael Mahood has named his goal posts Jim and Ethel.

Of course, he is also the one who started it.

"We were sitting around having some beers, trying to think of a way to get more press coverage for our sport. And I thought, yeah, goalies are supposed to be eccentric. They talk to their posts, like Patrick Roy.''

Thus the uprights were christened and reporters ran with the goofy story, at least on those occasions when they – we – pay any attention at all to field hockey and the guys who play it.

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I mean, come on, can't these guys skate, like normal red-blooded Canadian hockey players? Field hockey is for girls, no? With the cute little skirts and the varsity sweaters and the curved sticks – not in a Bobby Hull way either.

"It's not a girls' sport,'' Mahood, Canadian netminder, says wearily, fielding that question for maybe the 1,000th time. "Funny how it's only considered a girly sport in Canada. Throughout the Commonwealth, it's thought of as a men's game – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa.

"I'm really not sure why it never caught on in Canada, or why it has that sissy reputation. Men with sticks in their hands – anything can happen. There's nothing sissy about that.''

Field hockey – hockey sur le, uh, grass – has been an Olympic sport since nearly the beginning of the modern Games re-launch, this year celebrating its centenary and traditionally a male pursuit, the women welcomed under the five rings only since 1980.

The federation's historical guide suggests that a "crude'' form of hockey – and no, we're not talking about the Leafs circa 2006-2008 – was played in Egypt some 4,000 years ago, by the Aztecs in South America and even by an ethnic Chinese minority in ancient days.

This is all hockey hooey, we thinks.

What's significant, from a hoser perspective, is that Canada qualified for the Beijing Games, boy-wise, after failing to secure a spot in Athens. Alas, they've drawn a formidable group in the opening round, making their debut on Monday against powerhouse Australia, merely favoured for gold here, with challenges from Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. Spain? Whatever.

"If you're a betting man, you're not going with us at all,'' concedes the veteran Mahood, 33, going for his last hurrah in Beijing. "But we'll take a big swing and see what happens. A top-eight finish would be a good achievement for us, setting up Canada for the future.''

For those who worship at the altar of multiculturalism, field hockey should be particularly popular.

Team Canada is a smorgasbord of ethnicities, with heavy representation from the Indo-Canadian community but lots of All-WASP members too, not even a generation removed from England, given the sports Commonwealth heritage.

"I don't think we have anybody on the team who has two parents born in Canada,'' says Mahood.

It was, ahem, Mahood who almost sparked an international incident, the anti-diplomatic kind, a decade ago at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. Canadians might remember it: The dirty rotten Canuck scoundrel who gooned a Malaysian player while the guy was on his knees praying after a win over Canada. Oy, the horror, the shame-shame-shame.

To this day, Mahood denies ever doing any such thing, even though those of us who were there that day clearly recall the Malaysian fellow going arse-over-teakettle.

"Never touched him,'' Mahood protests. "It wasn't a collision at all. It was just a bad TV angle. In real life, I was, like, about three feet away from him.

"The guy and I had a laugh about it later.''

In that other kind of hockey, probably nobody would have said boo. Or boo-hoo.

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